Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Booknotes: Our Good and Faithful Servant

United States Supreme Court Justice James Moore Wayne of Georgia refused to follow his home state out of the Union and kept his seat on the bench. In a situation repeated across the South (see Peter Carmichael's The Last Generation), Justice Wayne's son, Henry Wayne, opposed his father's conservative pro-Union views and was radicalized by the secession movement, resigning his U.S. Army commission and joining the Confederate armed forces. "This book tells their story and examines the nature of Georgia's strong and largely overlooked unionist sentiment in the decades before the Civil War." Like an increasing number of scholarly studies of southern unionism, Our Good and Faithful Servant uses the Wayne family history to drill deeply into the "economic, political, and social dimensions of unionism in the state of Georgia."